Reuters’ recurring media revenue fell by eight per cent, due to web sites cancelling services such as news and information feeds.
This probably signals an adjustment in the online news business. General news is a commodity, and so are general news audiences. A lot of sites must be reconsidering paying for news feeds that are not perceived as exclusive.
Author: Barry Parr
I'm sure it leads to blindness
Thanks to Jeremy Zawodny for bringing the term “flashturbation” to our attention.
I’ve never been a fan of Flash. It seems to have three uses: entertainment, information, and attention-getting. I don’t find most of the entertainment applications very appealing, it’s seldom used in any way that actually adds information, and about 95% of the time it’s used to get your attention (either in splash screens for corporate sites or in advertising). Finally, Flash production just increases the operating costs of most sites.
Always ask yourself: is that Flash really necessary?
Consumers don't want (mobile carriers' vision of) wireless Internet
US Mobile phone users aren’t interested in wireless internet service, according to the Yankee Group: 82 percent of respondents said they did not use wireless Internet service.
About half of the nonusers either didn’t want to do so or didn’t need too.
16 percent said it was too expensive. Other reasons: it was too complicated, too slow, or not available in respondents’ area.
Now, think about the billions invested in 3G spectrum and infrastructure. That money is never coming back.
More on Disney's private label MSN service
There are more interesting tidbits in the NY Times story. Disney will distribute Disney-labeled MSN disks “in its theme parks, stores and its DVD packages”, and claims it will be profitable from the start. Although there are no details on the revenue share, I imagine they’re taking a sales commission.
Saul Hansell notes another conflict in the story: MSN is partly owned by NBC, a direct competitor to Disney’s ABC network. Eisner has already in bed with NBC: ESPN.com is now part of MSNBC!
Kevin Werbach notes that Microsoft is saying it’s not a media company, it’s a cable company.
This is a lot like the deal the Mercury News (and other media companies) did with AOL back in 1993. I think it shows that Disney is so desperate to appear like they’re moving forward that they’ll do any deal. All these accounts are Microsoft customers with a tenuous relationship to Disney that will fall away over time. Unless you do the actual work in a relationship like this, the brand adds scant value. Microsoft built the system and the software, and Disney even claims they’re piggybacking on Microsoft’s $300 million marketing blitz.
Content and its discontents
Emarketer examines the size of the content market, including some figures by segment from the Online Publishers’ Association and some very big numbers for the overall content market from IDC, which has gotten into the habit of defining markets so broadly as to make their numbers meaningless. For example, they redefined the ASP market as the xSP market, which included the telcos. You do the math.
Vin Crosbie revisits the OPA numbers, noting that most of what the OPA calls content isn’t content, and includes services like dating and greeting cards. He’s right, of course, and if you look examine the numbers behind the OPA’s claim that spending on content increased 92% last year, you realize that the kind of stuff publishers think of as content is a tiny share of the market.
Vin’s conclusion: publishers should think about new kinds of content — and advertising.
The Baltimore Sun site talks to smaller newspapers that are just going online. Because they’re more often small companies and not outposts of huge corporations, they’ve been cautious, practical, and eccentric in their approaches. Protection of the core business and avoiding unnecessary expense are key values in this market.
For the most part, these people aren’t innovators. But we may get some relief from the current online news groupthink from their sheer numbers and eccentricities.
Less usefully, Alcatel says the key to the success of broadband service is bundling it with content. This is what happens when third-string telecom switch makers decide to think strategically and another argument against vertical integration.
Cognitive radio, open spectrum, and free markets
“Cognitive radio” is the solution to the to the current phoney spectrum shortage. Another must-read to on this topic is Kevin Werbach’s white paper, Open Spectrum: The New Wireless Paradigm.
The open question is whether the FCC will be true to its free-market rhetoric or its NAB masters. OK, so it’s not really an open question.
Arts & Letters Daily is back
SprintPCS gets pricing right, fumbles customer service
Well, I’m ready to buy, so I tried to get some information about the Sprint PCS Vision deal. Wow, what a mess.
As far as I can tell, the offer is not listed on their Web site. Nor is the phone number for customer service.
When you call Sprint, the recording tells you that “because of their new promotions” the wait time will be longer than expected. Has that message been changed since 1998?
The good news is that the offer is real. The bad news is that you have to buy a PCS Vision phone in addition to the PC Card modem. That adds about $250 to the price of admission and is another example of short-sighted bundling by the mobile carriers.
I asked the salesperson if any of the Sprint PCS Vision PC card modems work with a Macintosh. He couldn’t answer that question, so he said he’d connect me with someone who could. That turned out to be “Clair”, Sprint’s lame voice-response tech support computer. Once Clair established that she had no idea what I was talking about, “she” forwarded me to another salesperson who couldn’t answer my question and couldn’t find anyone who could answer it. He finally suggested I go to my local Radio Shack and ask them.
No wonder Sprint PCS is losing customers.
Publishing on the Net means giving up control
If you’re reading this in Windows (and you probably are), you don’t know what you’re missing. I recently had the opportunity to see MediaSavvy on a Windows PC. God, it’s ugly.
The difference between the Mac and PC in something as simple as rendering Web pages is blindingly clear. The most important differences are fonts (Lucida Grande vs. (yuk) Arial) and in rendering (anti-aliased vs. pixelly) and color (subtle differences become sameness).
There’s nothing I can do about this, short of doing the site as a PDF file. Publishing on the Net is about giving up control in lots of different ways.
Bundling=Bungling
I’ve been thinking about my ideal mobile setup. Here’s what I want: T-Mobile’s Handspring PDA/Phone, AT&T Wireless T68i phone, and SprintPCS Vision’s $10/month unlimited wireless access for my TiBook.
See the problem? It’s bundling. Because you have to buy handsets from the carriers, it’s impossible to get what you want. Until they stop trying to “add value” to their networks by controlling how you access them, the wireless carriers will continue to be distracted from their core business and serve their best customers poorly.
I think I’m going to keep my Sprint account and add the $10 data service for my laptop and forego the PDA for the time being.